Rafferty: A Baby Boomer passes the baton

Published 6:50 pm, Friday, December 27, 2013

Depending on whom you ask, a human generation is traditionally 20 years long, which sounds short to me. Or 30, which is the commonly accepted span between an adult and his children. While some even say 40 years, time enough for that new crop of children to start to develop their own identity. Whichever idea you subscribe to, in just a couple of days the calendar will turn to 2014 and we will be 50 years removed from the birth of the last of the Baby Boom generation.

Remember the Boomers? Born to a prosperous post-war America in the mid-20th century, these starry-eyed optimists were going to be smarter, more resourceful, more creative, and would transform the world as no one had ever done before. They helped create the vision of what we all thought the 21st century would look like. Space stations and voyages to Mars. A cure for cancer and healthy lives twice as long as we enjoy now. An end to hunger, undersea colonies, and uber-cool jet packs. Now on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the last of the boomers, I must ask . . . where's my jet pack?

Back in the day, when forecasting the 21st century was all the rage, we had a different sensibility as Americans. Yes there was still segregation, and women "knew their place," and there were likely just as many cement-headed louts as you find on today's Fox News, but as a nation we celebrated education and forward thinking optimism. We held ticker tape parades for scientists, concert violinists and heads of state from countries today's kids couldn't find on a map if you spotted them the continent. The GI Bill, maybe the best idea we ever had, motivated millions to be the first in their family to go to college. While tens of thousands answered the call to service and to making the world a better place though organizations such as the Peace Corps. Our answer to Sputnik was to make ourselves smarter. Send even more kids to college to become scientists and engineers. You had to be smart to win a game show and people read 5,000-word essays in literary magazines, not People magazine.

Today a misspelled 140-character tweet is too challenging for some. Being smart went from cool to lame. Following your gut replaced following the facts. Far too many of those college kids realized science was hard and Wall Street paid better. We stopped caring about human rights and suffering around the globe. Our government no longer had the stomach for investing time and money into blue-sky ideas, and companies became shackled to shareholders and quarterly profits.

In fairness, we are getting the super-powerful computing that was theorized, but as individuals we rarely use it for great or inspiring purposes. Mostly we take pictures of our breakfast, make duck faces at each other, search for porn, desperately hope people "Like" us, and make horribly disturbing and insensitive anonymous comments about other people.

So where did us Boomers go wrong? I'll contend it was the day we accepted Reaganism and its "trickle-down" ideology that favors the rich over everyone and anything else. Its lack of commitment to investing in the future, its greed-is-good mantra and its pathological insistence that anything Americans do is ipso facto better than anything done anywhere else.

So on this historic anniversary, let this writer, on behalf of his generational peers, announce that the Baby Boom is done. To my children and theirs, it is now officially Your Time. If the past couple of decades are any example, we will not be doing anything more to contribute to the society we bequeath to you. In fact we'll probably hurt and hinder your efforts when you try to do great, jaw-dropping things. But in return for our stepping back I ask of you two conditions. First, recognize that what we dreamed about -- the desire to invent and explore, the balance between profitability and humanity, educating and uplifting everybody equally, and finding sustainable solutions to long-term global challenges -- these are honorable goals you should dedicate yourselves to, even if we often fell short. And second, make sure my grandkids get those jet packs. Happy New Year.